Copyright © Stephen E. Jones[1]
This is part #16, "The man on the Shroud: No style," of my series, "The evidence is overwhelming that the Turin Shroud is Jesus' burial sheet!" See the Main index for more information about this series.
[Main index #1] [Previous: No paint, etc. #15] [Next: Non-directional #17]
- The man on the Shroud #8
- No style #16
Introduction. The image of the man on the Shroud has no artistic style[2].
[Above (enlarge):
"This painting of Christ by Simone Martini [c. 1284–1344] is an underdrawing for a fresco, executed in sinopia (red ochre) c.1340. Walter McCrone [1916-2002] suggested that Simone, or an artist like him, might have painted the Shroud using a similar technique, but the idea is implausible. Like all medieval artists, Simone represents Christ in an idealized manner, and his brushwork is always evident"[3].And unlike the man's image on the Shroud, Martini, like all visual artists[4], had a distinctive individual artistic style, which "contrasted with the sobriety and monumentality of Florentine art, and is noted for its soft, stylized, decorative features, sinuosity of line, and courtly elegance"[5] and which fitted into the artistic style category of "gothic"[6].]Every artist has a style. "Every artist .. is identifiable by his style, which is as characteristic of him as his signature or thumbprint"[7].Shroud image has no style. But the image of the man on the Shroud has no style of its own[8]. The Shroud has "no ... characteristic of any artistic style"[9]. But in the case of the Shroud ... there really is no 'style' on which to base any art history judgement[10].
Not fourteenth-century. The image "differs fundamentally from fourteenth-century art, the very period to which its opponents ascribe its origin"[11]. "The style of painting in the fourteenth century was not nearly so realistic as the Shroud figure"[12]
Not medieval. The Shroud image has "nothing in common with any medieval French or" Italian style[13]. "The Shroud of Turin shows no affinity whatsoever with any of the styles ... in the Middle Ages"[14]. "The Shroud goes against any medieval style of any known artist and even against the mindset of the period"[15].
Not any historical period. The "image does not show the slightest semblance of any artist's style of any historical period."[16].
No style category. From "the standpoint of painting style, the Cloth of Turin cannot be fitted into any category"[17].
Art historians ignore the Shroud. Art historians ignore the Shroud[18], because to assign it to any particular "date and country, would revolutionize all the history of art"[19].
Not a work of art. The "image on the Cloth of Turin is not a work of art at all, as those who have probed its artistic technique and style all but unanimously confess"[20].
Impersonal. The image is impersonal[21].Automatic. "The ... image can only be the automatic likeness of a real human body"[22]. "The photographic negative of the Shroud ... proves that the image involves some sort of automatic transformation"[23], e.g. all at once, as with a photograph (see next).
Photograph. "The negative image has no style whatever ... It seems obviously a photograph, that is, an image made by light"[24]. The "negative of the face ... [is] unmistakably photograph-like and lacking in any artist's style"[25].
Problem for the forgery theory. That the image of the man on the Shroud has no artistic style is yet another major problem for the forgery theory (see previous three: #13, #14 and #15). It further rules out all theories that the Shroud man's image was painted, which we had already seen [11Jul16]. It also rules out all bas relief and statue theories because the underlying bas relief or statue would have have had artistic style[26].
That the Shroud image was created by an automatic process and is a photograph does leave in forgery by a medieval photograph. As far as I am aware there are only two theories which claim that the Shroud image is a medieval photograph: Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince's "Leonardo da Vinci photograph" theory, and Prof. Nicholas Allen's "medieval photography" theory.
But as we saw in a previous post [30Jun16], Picknett and Prince's "Leonardo" theory is false on multiple grounds, not least that it is a plagiarisation of Prof. Nicholas Allen's theory and it is based on a lie, that they received their information about Leonardo faking the Shroud from a non-existent "Giovanni" who was a member of the non-existent "Priory of Sion"!
That leaves Prof. Nicholas Allen's "medieval photography" theory as the last photograph forgery theory standing. But as we saw [07Aug16 & 01Sep16], that theory also fails for multiple reasons, including: 1) Allen never proved (for obvious reasons) that his camera obscura and quartz lens photograph would work with a real, decomposing, human body hung out in the sun for 6-8 days. 2) Allen's "solorograph" of a plaster 
bodycast, unlike the Shroud image, is directional, with sun illumination on the image's beard, chest, knees and feet (see cover photo on Allen's book [right]), and top of the head, if Allen had not fraudulently (presumably self-deceptively) substituted a different top of the head image (the hair on Allen's image does not match that of the bodycast). 3) Allen used silver salts to capture the bodycast's image on linen, but it was not known until the 19th century that silver salts darkened because of light, not heat; 4) Allen needed a 180 mm (~7 inch) diameter, optical quality, quartz lens to obtain an image at all within a time-frame of 8 days (Allen admitted that "by the eighth day ... disfigurement [due to "decomposition"] would have been too noticeable for the corpse to have remained a viable subject"[27]). But Allen evidently fraudulently (presumably self-deceptively) used a 180 mm diameter "synthetic quartz"[28], i.e. "fused quartz" blank, which was made from quartz sand, not quartz rock crystal, and heated in a modern furnace to 2,000°C. And the technology to melt quartz at such a high temperature did not exist until the Industrial Revolution of the 18th century!
Resurrection of Jesus!
"Snapshot of the resurrection"! That the Shroud man's image has no artistic style, yet every artist has a style, is impersonal, automatic and a photograph, means that the Shroud image actually is a photograph, in the original sense of a "drawing with light":
"The word `photograph' was coined in 1839 by Sir John Herschel and is based on the Greek φῶς (phos), meaning `light', and γραφή (graphê), meaning `drawing, writing', together meaning `drawing with light'"[29]And that the only two (as far as I am aware) anti-authenticist forgery by photography theories, that of Picknett and Prince and Nicholas Allen, fail. Which leaves as the only viable photography theory remaining, that the Man on the Shroud is Jesus and the image on the Shroud is a photograph, "a literal `snapshot' of the Resurrection":
"Even from the limited available information, a hypothetical glimpse of the power operating at the moment of creation of the Shroud's image may be ventured. In the darkness of the Jerusalem tomb the dead body of Jesus lay, unwashed, covered in blood, on a stone slab. Suddenly, there is a burst of mysterious power from it. In that instant ... the body becomes indelibly fused onto the cloth, preserving for posterity a literal `snapshot' of the Resurrection"[30].
Transfiguration a preview of the Resurrection In the Transfiguration, when Jesus "was transfigured before them," i.e. the Apostles Peter, James and John (Mt 17:1-13; Mk 9:2-13; Lk 9:28-36):
"his [Jesus'] face shone like the sun, and his clothes became white as light" (Mt 17:2).attention is focused on the terms "white as light," "dazzling white," and "radiant, intensely white"[31]
"his clothes became radiant, intensely white, as no one on earth could bleach them" (Mk 9:3).
"the appearance of his face was altered, and his clothing became dazzling white" (Lk 9:29).
The Christian Church historically has understood the Transfiguration as "a preview of the glorified body of Christ following his Resurrection":
"This was not only a view within the Eastern Church and in the West, most commentators in the Middle Ages considered the Transfiguration a preview of the glorified body of Christ following his Resurrection."[32]It is the view of many Shroud scholars, including Ian Wilson[33], Rex Morgan[34], John Iannone[35], Mark Oxley[36], August Accetta[37], that Jesus' image was imprinted onto the Shroud's linen by the light of His resurrection.This is also the view of Prof. Giulio Fanti:
"Italian chemist Giulio Fanti of the University of Padua has proposed that the image might have been burnt into the upper layers of the cloth by a burst of `radiant energy' - bright light, ultraviolet light, X-rays or streams of fundamental particles - emanating from the body itself. Fanti cites the account of Christ's Transfiguration, witnessed by Peter, John and James and recounted in Luke 9:29: `As he was praying, the appearance of his face changed, and his clothes became as bright as a flash of lightning.' This is, to put it mildly, rather circumstantial evidence. But Fanti suggests we might at least test whether artificial sources of such radiation can produce a similar result on linen."[38]The above 2015 article which quoted Fanti that, "we might at least test whether artificial sources of such radiation can produce a similar result on linen," does not give the date when Fanti wrote or said that. But three years before, in 2012, Fanti was associated with a scientific group, working under the auspices of Italy's ENEA agency, which discovered that the closest approximation yet to the colour, extreme superficiality, and other characteristics of the Shroud man's image, was obtained using an excimer laser delivering "a short and intense burst of VUV [vacuum ultraviolet] directional radiation" [22Dec11]:
"ENEA, the National Agency for New Technologies, Energy and Sustainable Economic Development, has published a report on five years of experiments conducted in the ENEA center of Frascati on the `shroud-like coloring of linen fabrics by far ultraviolet radiation'. `Simply put: we tried to understand how the Shroud of Turin was imprinted by an image so special that it constitutes its charm, and poses a great and very radical challenge, `to identify the physical and chemical processes capable of generating a color similar to that of the image on the Shroud. `... One of the assumptions related to the formation of the image was that regarding some form of electromagnetic energy (such as a flash of light at short wavelength), which could fit the requirements for reproducing the main features of the Shroud image, such as superficiality of color, color gradient, the image also in areas of the body not in contact with the cloth and the absence of pigment on the sheet. ... the results of ENEA `show that a short and intense burst of VUV directional radiation can color a linen cloth so as to reproduce many of the peculiar characteristics of the body image on the Shroud of Turin, including shades of color, the surface color of the fibrils of the outer linen fabric, and the absence of fluorescence'."[39]But the only `problem' with that is, "to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height," would require "a total power of VUV radiation" of "34 thousand billion watts!:
"However, ENEA scientists warn, `it should be noted that the total power of VUV radiations required to instantly color the surface of linen that corresponds to a human of average height, body surface area equal to = 2000 MW/cm2 17000 cm2 = 34 thousand billion watts makes it impractical today to reproduce the entire Shroud image using a single laser excimer, since this power cannot be produced by any VUV light source built to date (the most powerful available on the market come to several billion watts'"![40]
That would be no problem for "the powerful working of God, who raised him [Jesus] from the dead" (Col 2:12) but it is an impossibility for a medieval forger!
To be continued in part #17 of this series.
Notes
1. This post is copyright. Permission is granted to quote from any part of this post (but not the whole post), provided it includes a reference citing my name, its subject heading, its date, and a hyperlink back to this post. [return]
2. Barbet, P., 1953, "A Doctor at Calvary," [1950], Earl of Wicklow, transl., Image Books: Garden City NY, Reprinted, 1963, p.31; Bulst, W., 1957, "The Shroud of Turin," McKenna, S. & Galvin, J.J., transl., Bruce Publishing Co: Milwaukee WI, pp.31-32; Wilson, I., 1986, "The Evidence of the Shroud," Guild Publishing: London, p.4; Iannone, J.C., 1998, "The Mystery of the Shroud of Turin: New Scientific Evidence," St Pauls: Staten Island NY, pp.4, 156-157, 180; Guscin, M., 1998, "The Oviedo Cloth," Lutterworth Press: Cambridge UK, p.114; Cahill, T., 1999, "Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World before and after Jesus," Nan A. Talese/Doubleday: New York NY, pp.291-292; Wilson, I. & Schwortz, B., 2000, "The Turin Shroud: The Illustrated Evidence," Michael O'Mara Books: London, p.32; Wilson, I., 2010, "The Shroud: The 2000-Year-Old Mystery Solved," Bantam Press: London, p.11. [return]
3. de Wesselow, T., 2012, "The Sign: The Shroud of Turin and the Secret of the Resurrection," Viking: London, p.288A. [return]
4. "Style (visual arts)," Wikipedia, 28 May 2016. [return]
5. "Simone Martini," Wikipedia, 1 September 2016. [return]
6. Ibid. [return]
7. Cahill, 1999, p.291. [return]
8. Barbet, 1953, p.31. [return]
9. Iannone, 1998, p.4. [return]
10. Wilson, 2010, p.11. [return]
11. Bulst, 1957, p.32. [return]
12. Scavone, D.C., 1989, "The Shroud of Turin: Opposing Viewpoints," Greenhaven Press: San Diego CA, p.57. [return]
13. Barbet, 1953, p.31. [return]
14. Iannone, 1998, p.156. [return]
15. Iannone, 1998, p.180. [return]
16. Wilson, 1986, p.4; Iannone, 1998, p.4. [return]
17. Bulst, 1957, p.31. [return]
18. de Wesselow, 2012, p.187. [return]
19. Barnes, A.S., 1934, "The Holy Shroud of Turin," Burns Oates & Washbourne: London, p.15. [return]
20. Bulst, 1957, p.41. [return]
21. Barbet, 1953, p.31. [return]
22. de Wesselow, 2012, p.139. [return]
23. de Wesselow, 2012, p.137. [return]
24. Cahill, 1999, pp.291-292. [return]
25. Wilson & Schwortz, 2000, p.33. [return]
26. de Wesselow, 2012, p.139. [return]
27. Allen, N.P.L., 1998, "The Turin Shroud and the Crystal Lens: Testament to a Lost Technology," Empowerment Technologies: Port Elizabeth, South Africa, p.93. [return]
28. Allen, 1998, pp.94, 96-97, 207, 240. [return]
29. "Photograph," Wikipedia, 12 August 2016. [return]
30. Wilson, I., 1979, "The Shroud of Turin: The Burial Cloth of Jesus Christ?," [1978], Image Books: New York NY, Revised edition, p.251. [return]
31. Iannone, J.C., 2010, "The Three Cloths of Christ: The Emerging Treasures of Christianity," NorthStar Production Studios & Lulu Press: Kissimmee FL, p.102. [return]
32. "Transfiguration of Jesus: Transfiguration and Resurrection," Wikipedia, 1 September 2016. [return]
33. Wilson, 1979, p.250. [return]
34. Morgan, R., 1980, "Perpetual Miracle: Secrets of the Holy Shroud of Turin by an Eye Witness," Runciman Press: Manly NSW, Australia, p.77. [return]
35. Iannone, 2010, p.102. [return]
36. Oxley, M., 2010, "The Challenge of the Shroud: History, Science and the Shroud of Turin," AuthorHouse: Milton Keynes UK, pp.250-251. [return]
37. Martindale, S., 2013, "H.B. doctor submits Shroud of Turin to scientific method," The Orange County Register, August 21. [return]
38. Ball, P., 2015, "How did the Turin Shroud get its image?," BBC, 19 June. [return]
39. Tosatti, M., 2011, "The Shroud is not a fake," Vatican Insider, 12 December. [return]
40. Ibid. [return]
Posted 5 September 2016. Updated 19 August 2024.
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